"Always be a poet, even in prose"--but how to keep your work readable to others beside yourself?
Another thing I have recently been thinking about is the moral dilemma I myself have about whether a story or a poem--or even a single line, or metaphor--should make (perfect, clear-cut) sense or not, or whether its beauty and integrity (i.e. staying true to the form it arrived into the poet's brain in) are more important.
This is, of course, poetic writing we're talking about, that is--this does not concern people who write mechanistically, but those of us who write in a shamanic/poetic way. Mostly because I know how fucking annoying it is to read that kind of thing where the text is beautiful, but you feel like you've missed something and that maybe this bit and that bit only makes sense to the author. (And I'm going to tell you a secret: it doesn't always make sense to the author either.)
Yet, I firmly believe in the value, the inherent value of poetry, of these images, visions--the poetic writer is a shaman, a navigatrix of the subconscious. When that inspiration comes, it's holy. It's sacred. It comes from so deep within that only religious-mythological imagery is anywhere near adequate when it comes to describing it. Anaïs comes to mind, immediately: her books go all over the place, but the individual sentences, ideas, scenes are sparkling with beauty and insight. Only when she was forced to write porn for $$$ did she have to try and force herself into writing plot, beginnings and ends, concisely and without too much poetry--as a result, her writing is more readable, but it is also bled of her usual beauty to the point where she's operating on maybe a third of her poetic capacity. It is easier to read, yes. But there's less beauty, less sensuality and emotional intensity, and it seems stunted, suffocated, clipped.
What's more important--being true to the visions, the words, the inspiration and imagery and the (sensory) sensations that come, or legibility? This is a serious question, and a political one at that, because again we have the good old dualistic/patriarchal value system up against ourselves, here: crisp and dry reason and order and sparseness is valued because it's no-nonsense, it's rational, it's ~masculine~, and intuitive, poetic, dreamlike, emotional, sensory/sensual, Romantic things are, of course seen as feminine and therefore devalued. And as the latter has been constantly subjugated and shamed with stamps like "purple prose" and all the trashing romance novels get (invariably from people who have never read a good example of the genre--note how SF/F has now been raised out of a similar ghetto thanks to male geeks now being in power over media, whereas women haven't been able to do the same? And this is why romance is still seen as trashy crap... Oh, wait, it's not just the geeky guys, several of whom are feminists. It's because women don't believe in the value of what they themselves feel, what they themselves love, what they themselves create--an entire generation calls themselves "shipper trash," so maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe? A tiny bit?) All in all, it's good old dualism in action again--the same thing that divorces us from our bodies, tries to divorce men and ambitious women from emotions, tries to divorce the subconscious from the conscious, tries to split everything into neat black/white, good/evil when Nature and human history have always been way more complex than that.
But I see those patterns and I go against them, very very deliberately: in a world that thinks poetic writing is stupid and shameful and flighty, I pour out poetry even harder. Because it's not as if that experience--the Romantic, the shamanic, the intuitive, the subconscious, the poetic--is, just like femaleness, of any less inborn value. We are born with the capacity for it; it emerges naturally; it keeps on showing up no matter how hard it's shamed and suffocated. We still dream in symbols; even animals have rituals--it's the same thing as with religion, spirituality, whatever fucking word you want me to use of the stuff that, like sex and femininity and poetry, is also shamed by Modern Rational Intellectual People due to being associated with abuse it isn't born with. Just like pussies and tits and estrogenated brains keep on emerging into the world, and even if they keep being shat on and even if they shit on themselves more than anyone else--or, exactly because of that--I keep fighting for the recognition of the inherent value and usefulness and the nourishing, healing capacities of the poetic. It's only the modern Western world in its ever-increasing cynicism and machismo that has blasphemously belittled that which used to be sacred.
But even the oracles, the shamans often said things that nobody understood, and people had to interpret that--and even then, the interpretations themselves led to a dead end. Now, how to avoid that? How do you both express this beauty that's been given to you, that runs through you, *and* utilise this gift to serve the world?
See, unlike Anaïs, I don't want to set myself up as a martyr who just says "well, you just don't understand my writing, because you don't understand psychology"--the only defense she had before second-wave feminism, the Jungian psychoanalysts having been the only refuge for her/our/poets' writing in those days. Nor do I want to do what many, many Generation X fangirls and American schoolteachers and the like did and still do: cut off all poetry just to make sure none of that icky purple prose bleeds in. That smacks too much of hairy-armpit, anti-sex feminism (because if something's been beautiful or pleasurable and a guy's ever derived pleasure from it, let's deny that pleasure to everyone ever, including women themselves) or the now-epidemic queer misogyny (let's erase tits because tits get you abused and women *are* shitty and deserve all they get), of castrating yourself/veiling and segregating all your women because your penis can't stop doing bad things if it sees a woman's hairdo (as if your brain was unable to guide your genitals because hey, you're only a man and therefore an animal!), of Saïdian definitions of Orientalism that are the cultural history equivalent of "all heterosexual sex is rape" (because clearly there are no such things as positive cultural interactions at all, and all interracial marriages have been slavery). I could go on. But it's all the same thing: someone, often someone who's been victimised, is cutting off something real and natural just because someone has, at some point, systematically abused it and oppressed others with it. Oohboy, does the anti-poetry thing ever tick so many boxes in my "Is This Counterproductive And Quite Possibly Misogynist Dualistic Bullshit That Doesn't Actually Change Anything For The Better" checklist.
And because I suck at the whole sense-making thing. As you can see from my having veered off on a tangent again.
How does a poet serve both the muses and the people, the Inspiration and the readers, the world of thoughts and the material world in which we live and move and have our being? How does one transcend the duality--how does one bridge the gap, sew the lost limbs and genitals back on and give physiotherapy to them, give enough encouragement and support to those parts of human nature that have been beaten out of us because they were supposedly feminine? How do you use both reason and emotion, inspiration and syntax to *communicate* rather than just lie there in a work that's masturbatory, cocooned in your impenetrability, complete unto yourself? Where do you draw the line between what's beneficial for the reader in that it makes her *think*--if it lets her make her own interpretations on the basis of her own knowledge and emotions, if it stimulates her thought, hell, even makes her look something up in a dictionary--or something that's just really fucking annoying and obscure and makes the writer look really smug and elitist in a "ha ha, I know a fancy word but you don't--even if you should, you uneducated swine" kind of way? What's bad writing, and what's just someone's characteristic style? When does someone need to adjust her writing, to train herself to produce better text--and when is she being forced to do something unnatural, being suffocated, being forced to leave out things that she has a driving passion to say (like arranging the words in a certain way because they sound more beautiful that way)? How can one serve beauty and poetry while maintaining readability? Where do you draw the line?
This is one of those things where again, women and everyone else who's ever been "into" things considered "feminine" have to find their own way--simply because these things haven't been talked about and there are no roadmaps, and even if someone's found/made one, or has been talking about the subject at length, there have been so few of us that the information's never been passed on and spread adequately, so that it could have reached everyone it should have reached. And it's disheartening and depressing, but someone has to do it--or at least try, try and try again.
I can't say I can do it one hundred per cent--I keep seeing sentences I wrote and still don't know what the fuck I meant by them. I know that in many things, when they involve this kind of hitting back at suffocation, I strike harder than I should and smash things up, and then I've accidentally cracked one joke too many while wearing a poker face, or been too rash and hard in criticising something no matter how right I am (even scientifically speaking), and just generally gone over the top. That's what happens when you have passion but you don't have a system to channel it through, a well-balanced and calibrated and oiled and complex system of checks and balances. And it's so bloody *exhausting,* let me tell you--as it must be for everyone else who has to do the same, whether it be responsible sexuality or poetic writing or being an emancipated woman and whatnot. Where the fuck's the support group for writers who write romance but not the lowest common denominator trash? Where the fuck's the support group for poets who aren't conceited young hipster guys? Where the roaming band of female aghoris? Nowhere. (Well, maybe if you live in San Francisco, I guess; but even then the inner politics of all the hippie groups would soon tear them apart.) Basically, if the only options you've ever had have been "don't do it at all" or "WHEEEE, I DON'T GIVE A SHIT; LET'S FUCK SHIT UP," oh, go on, *you* try finding a balance in that! Again, it's the exact same thing as with sexuality! I don't even have a sodding beta reader because I haven't found a single writer who's operating on the same principles and who has the same background knowledge I do--so I err on the side of poetic these days, simply because something in me is seeking out to make up for all those years when I was told I couldn't use this image or that metaphor because I must've just been a Stupid Foreigner Who Doesn't Know How English Works or a lousy fanficcer slipping into purple prose. It feels *emotionally* right. Even if I have a sneaking suspicion that at times, I've been... gods, is the word "selfish" rearing its ugly head? Well, somehow distanced from the reader. But again, you can't submit your writing to other people's pleasure, either--I'm sick of that, so you will probably be seeing a hell of a lot of frothy Romantic purple stuff before I'm done making up for all those years, before I've managed to water and junglify and lush-colourful-gardenify all the areas that they tried to turn into lawns or deserts; maybe I'm not even done when I'm in my grave.
So, all in all, this was me thinking out loud. Would be happy to discuss this with others who've struggled with the same, or even those who haven't but are "just" readers. (I don't think of people being as of less value if they're just readers/listeners. What they take from the stories and songs affects their thoughts and actions and words in the world outside. And if mass media has taught us anything, it's the audiences who "make" the works and not the other way round--a work can be a cold marble statue but the audiences breathe life into her.) I had something else to say (of course), but I forget it.
Signed, the bitch who felt something amazing and exhilarating and transcendental when she went the fuck ahead and did spell the word "cupped" as "cuppèd" in a piece of prose because that's how the sentence sounded in her head, and because obeying that sound, being true and faithful to it, was an act of bursting free from all chains of what's proper and not in ~Literature~.
This is, of course, poetic writing we're talking about, that is--this does not concern people who write mechanistically, but those of us who write in a shamanic/poetic way. Mostly because I know how fucking annoying it is to read that kind of thing where the text is beautiful, but you feel like you've missed something and that maybe this bit and that bit only makes sense to the author. (And I'm going to tell you a secret: it doesn't always make sense to the author either.)
Yet, I firmly believe in the value, the inherent value of poetry, of these images, visions--the poetic writer is a shaman, a navigatrix of the subconscious. When that inspiration comes, it's holy. It's sacred. It comes from so deep within that only religious-mythological imagery is anywhere near adequate when it comes to describing it. Anaïs comes to mind, immediately: her books go all over the place, but the individual sentences, ideas, scenes are sparkling with beauty and insight. Only when she was forced to write porn for $$$ did she have to try and force herself into writing plot, beginnings and ends, concisely and without too much poetry--as a result, her writing is more readable, but it is also bled of her usual beauty to the point where she's operating on maybe a third of her poetic capacity. It is easier to read, yes. But there's less beauty, less sensuality and emotional intensity, and it seems stunted, suffocated, clipped.
What's more important--being true to the visions, the words, the inspiration and imagery and the (sensory) sensations that come, or legibility? This is a serious question, and a political one at that, because again we have the good old dualistic/patriarchal value system up against ourselves, here: crisp and dry reason and order and sparseness is valued because it's no-nonsense, it's rational, it's ~masculine~, and intuitive, poetic, dreamlike, emotional, sensory/sensual, Romantic things are, of course seen as feminine and therefore devalued. And as the latter has been constantly subjugated and shamed with stamps like "purple prose" and all the trashing romance novels get (invariably from people who have never read a good example of the genre--note how SF/F has now been raised out of a similar ghetto thanks to male geeks now being in power over media, whereas women haven't been able to do the same? And this is why romance is still seen as trashy crap... Oh, wait, it's not just the geeky guys, several of whom are feminists. It's because women don't believe in the value of what they themselves feel, what they themselves love, what they themselves create--an entire generation calls themselves "shipper trash," so maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe? A tiny bit?) All in all, it's good old dualism in action again--the same thing that divorces us from our bodies, tries to divorce men and ambitious women from emotions, tries to divorce the subconscious from the conscious, tries to split everything into neat black/white, good/evil when Nature and human history have always been way more complex than that.
But I see those patterns and I go against them, very very deliberately: in a world that thinks poetic writing is stupid and shameful and flighty, I pour out poetry even harder. Because it's not as if that experience--the Romantic, the shamanic, the intuitive, the subconscious, the poetic--is, just like femaleness, of any less inborn value. We are born with the capacity for it; it emerges naturally; it keeps on showing up no matter how hard it's shamed and suffocated. We still dream in symbols; even animals have rituals--it's the same thing as with religion, spirituality, whatever fucking word you want me to use of the stuff that, like sex and femininity and poetry, is also shamed by Modern Rational Intellectual People due to being associated with abuse it isn't born with. Just like pussies and tits and estrogenated brains keep on emerging into the world, and even if they keep being shat on and even if they shit on themselves more than anyone else--or, exactly because of that--I keep fighting for the recognition of the inherent value and usefulness and the nourishing, healing capacities of the poetic. It's only the modern Western world in its ever-increasing cynicism and machismo that has blasphemously belittled that which used to be sacred.
But even the oracles, the shamans often said things that nobody understood, and people had to interpret that--and even then, the interpretations themselves led to a dead end. Now, how to avoid that? How do you both express this beauty that's been given to you, that runs through you, *and* utilise this gift to serve the world?
See, unlike Anaïs, I don't want to set myself up as a martyr who just says "well, you just don't understand my writing, because you don't understand psychology"--the only defense she had before second-wave feminism, the Jungian psychoanalysts having been the only refuge for her/our/poets' writing in those days. Nor do I want to do what many, many Generation X fangirls and American schoolteachers and the like did and still do: cut off all poetry just to make sure none of that icky purple prose bleeds in. That smacks too much of hairy-armpit, anti-sex feminism (because if something's been beautiful or pleasurable and a guy's ever derived pleasure from it, let's deny that pleasure to everyone ever, including women themselves) or the now-epidemic queer misogyny (let's erase tits because tits get you abused and women *are* shitty and deserve all they get), of castrating yourself/veiling and segregating all your women because your penis can't stop doing bad things if it sees a woman's hairdo (as if your brain was unable to guide your genitals because hey, you're only a man and therefore an animal!), of Saïdian definitions of Orientalism that are the cultural history equivalent of "all heterosexual sex is rape" (because clearly there are no such things as positive cultural interactions at all, and all interracial marriages have been slavery). I could go on. But it's all the same thing: someone, often someone who's been victimised, is cutting off something real and natural just because someone has, at some point, systematically abused it and oppressed others with it. Oohboy, does the anti-poetry thing ever tick so many boxes in my "Is This Counterproductive And Quite Possibly Misogynist Dualistic Bullshit That Doesn't Actually Change Anything For The Better" checklist.
And because I suck at the whole sense-making thing. As you can see from my having veered off on a tangent again.
How does a poet serve both the muses and the people, the Inspiration and the readers, the world of thoughts and the material world in which we live and move and have our being? How does one transcend the duality--how does one bridge the gap, sew the lost limbs and genitals back on and give physiotherapy to them, give enough encouragement and support to those parts of human nature that have been beaten out of us because they were supposedly feminine? How do you use both reason and emotion, inspiration and syntax to *communicate* rather than just lie there in a work that's masturbatory, cocooned in your impenetrability, complete unto yourself? Where do you draw the line between what's beneficial for the reader in that it makes her *think*--if it lets her make her own interpretations on the basis of her own knowledge and emotions, if it stimulates her thought, hell, even makes her look something up in a dictionary--or something that's just really fucking annoying and obscure and makes the writer look really smug and elitist in a "ha ha, I know a fancy word but you don't--even if you should, you uneducated swine" kind of way? What's bad writing, and what's just someone's characteristic style? When does someone need to adjust her writing, to train herself to produce better text--and when is she being forced to do something unnatural, being suffocated, being forced to leave out things that she has a driving passion to say (like arranging the words in a certain way because they sound more beautiful that way)? How can one serve beauty and poetry while maintaining readability? Where do you draw the line?
This is one of those things where again, women and everyone else who's ever been "into" things considered "feminine" have to find their own way--simply because these things haven't been talked about and there are no roadmaps, and even if someone's found/made one, or has been talking about the subject at length, there have been so few of us that the information's never been passed on and spread adequately, so that it could have reached everyone it should have reached. And it's disheartening and depressing, but someone has to do it--or at least try, try and try again.
I can't say I can do it one hundred per cent--I keep seeing sentences I wrote and still don't know what the fuck I meant by them. I know that in many things, when they involve this kind of hitting back at suffocation, I strike harder than I should and smash things up, and then I've accidentally cracked one joke too many while wearing a poker face, or been too rash and hard in criticising something no matter how right I am (even scientifically speaking), and just generally gone over the top. That's what happens when you have passion but you don't have a system to channel it through, a well-balanced and calibrated and oiled and complex system of checks and balances. And it's so bloody *exhausting,* let me tell you--as it must be for everyone else who has to do the same, whether it be responsible sexuality or poetic writing or being an emancipated woman and whatnot. Where the fuck's the support group for writers who write romance but not the lowest common denominator trash? Where the fuck's the support group for poets who aren't conceited young hipster guys? Where the roaming band of female aghoris? Nowhere. (Well, maybe if you live in San Francisco, I guess; but even then the inner politics of all the hippie groups would soon tear them apart.) Basically, if the only options you've ever had have been "don't do it at all" or "WHEEEE, I DON'T GIVE A SHIT; LET'S FUCK SHIT UP," oh, go on, *you* try finding a balance in that! Again, it's the exact same thing as with sexuality! I don't even have a sodding beta reader because I haven't found a single writer who's operating on the same principles and who has the same background knowledge I do--so I err on the side of poetic these days, simply because something in me is seeking out to make up for all those years when I was told I couldn't use this image or that metaphor because I must've just been a Stupid Foreigner Who Doesn't Know How English Works or a lousy fanficcer slipping into purple prose. It feels *emotionally* right. Even if I have a sneaking suspicion that at times, I've been... gods, is the word "selfish" rearing its ugly head? Well, somehow distanced from the reader. But again, you can't submit your writing to other people's pleasure, either--I'm sick of that, so you will probably be seeing a hell of a lot of frothy Romantic purple stuff before I'm done making up for all those years, before I've managed to water and junglify and lush-colourful-gardenify all the areas that they tried to turn into lawns or deserts; maybe I'm not even done when I'm in my grave.
So, all in all, this was me thinking out loud. Would be happy to discuss this with others who've struggled with the same, or even those who haven't but are "just" readers. (I don't think of people being as of less value if they're just readers/listeners. What they take from the stories and songs affects their thoughts and actions and words in the world outside. And if mass media has taught us anything, it's the audiences who "make" the works and not the other way round--a work can be a cold marble statue but the audiences breathe life into her.) I had something else to say (of course), but I forget it.
Signed, the bitch who felt something amazing and exhilarating and transcendental when she went the fuck ahead and did spell the word "cupped" as "cuppèd" in a piece of prose because that's how the sentence sounded in her head, and because obeying that sound, being true and faithful to it, was an act of bursting free from all chains of what's proper and not in ~Literature~.